Fertile (definition): [1] The willingness and ability to receive: love, nutrition, abundance, nourishment, creativity, kindness, wonder, a new way of being. [2] The ability to conceive; to create a new life. [3] Rich in resources, fruitful and prolific.
This is a book to help you to live a more fertile life. A book to help you engage in your health and fertility so that when you are ready to have a baby you will be as fertile as possible. Being healthy and being fertile go hand in hand.
This book is as much for your heart as it is for your body. It is a book about passion – passion for life and passion for food. I will show you how to live a more fertile, balanced and abundant life, without losing the joy. I will teach you how to really nourish yourself and your loved ones, both by helping you to understand what your body needs and by offering up a whole selection of tasty, nutritious recipes in the second half of this book. As I always say, if you want to nourish another, first you must learn to nourish yourself.
This book is about making delicious food and still leaving time for baby making. After all, you can have the best diet in the world but if you don’t find time for making love, babies tend to take a lot longer to put in an appearance. Pleasure, emotion and creation are intrinsically linked; keep that in mind when you start thinking about making a baby.
I will show you how to understand your body, what to eat to make your body function better and maintain a healthy weight, how to improve digestion and gut microbes, how to use food to manage minor (and not so minor) period problems, how to give yourself a monthly tonic, how to live to be more fertile, and how to have balanced hormones, manage your mood swings and improve your libido.
While I have studied many different systems of medicine, my original training was in tongue and pulse and differential diagnosis. These techniques are all part of Chinese medicine diagnosis and I use them on every patient. Differential diagnosis is a process of history taking that allows me to gain a unique insight into the person’s individual energetic picture and enables me to treat every patient appropriately and differently. Same disease; different patient! In other words, three people may have endometriosis but it will manifest differently in each person, meaning that each patient will need a different approach. It is fascinating to me that Western medicine is coming round to this approach, which they refer to as ‘individualised treatments’, but it has always been part of ancient systems of medicine such as Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic medicine.
I cannot imagine treating any other way and this is why this book is not like any other book you may read on diet, where everyone is recommended to eat the same foods. In my mind, this could never work; we are not all the same, we all respond to things in a different way, and have different constitutions and our own internal climate (which I tell you about in detail in Fertile Food, see here). All of this means that we respond to food, medicine, alcohol, stimulants, environment, emotions, illness and stress in an entirely unique way. So rule one is never compare yourself to anyone else – it is pointless!
My aim with this book is to enable you to come as close to the experience of a visit to my clinic as possible, and that means adapting my advice to fit your individual situation. This needs to work with your life and it needs to work for you. Of course, I am not actually there with you so I can’t make it bespoke for you. So you will need to develop some intuition. I don’t want you to follow what I suggest slavishly and create a joyless life for yourself. A fertile approach to living has joy at the heart of it. So if you are taking what I say in a rigid and controlled way, put the book down, go for a walk and listen to the voice inside you. This will take practice because I am not talking about the Mind here, I am talking Heart. When I listen to my patients in clinic, I hear what they are saying, but I also listen to what they are not telling me – I listen with my heart. Practise what I call ‘the middle way’; listen to my advice, but make it work for you.
I’d like to offer a little guidance around modern self-help approaches, diet and psychotherapy. I am a big fan of positive mental attitude and personal responsibility, often through modern self-help approaches, diet and psychotherapy. I believe it is important for us to develop awareness and to address past issues that may prevent us from being happy and healthy in the present. Emotions do impact on our physical health and they are not separate, the emotional backdrop to a person’s life must always be considered and not to do so is neglectful.
However, I have seen an increased number of people taking it all a little bit too far; taking responsibility and blaming themselves when things go wrong. ‘I feel like I am not getting pregnant because when I was trying to be positive some doubts crept in,’ or ‘I think the coffee I drank caused the miscarriage,’ or ‘I had a termination years ago and this is my punishment.’ When things go wrong in life we have not always caused them by our thoughts and our actions, nor is the universe punishing us for something we have or have not done. Punishing yourself for not eating an entirely perfect diet or not having entirely pure and positive thoughts one hundred per cent of the time is a tension in and of itself. Take the middle road, find your own balance, do not punish yourself or blame yourself for things that may be out of your control. Be content with being ‘good enough’.
Throughout this book I have included some very basic principles of Chinese medicine and some terminology that will help you. I have tried to strike a balance between giving you enough information and not baffling you! Actually, although I am simplifying it here for the sake of ease, Chinese medicine is an extremely complex system of healing with thousands of years of history. I hope I do not do it a disservice by diluting it down to the very simple version in this book. This is never my intention, but in order to keep this elegant medicine current I feel that it must also change and progress much like Western medicine does.
This system of medicine is able to address so many modern-day ills that were not even in existence when it was first developed. I am always in awe of the insights that I get from some of the very basic principles I was taught more than 20 years ago and I remain engaged and inspired by this beautiful medicine. Yet it is not perfect – no system is – and I find it works best when combined with Western medicine and a whole body approach, drawing on other ideas I have gleaned from yoga, psychotherapy, herbalism, modern nutritional and lifestyle research and through years of clinical observation of patients.
My aim is always to help you cultivate health and fertility, without becoming rigid or controlling. I want you to be consciously engaged in your health and the fertile choices you make every day. In many ways, baby making is a lot like cooking. First, we must have all the right ingredients and a vision of what we are trying to create. Next, we have to put the ingredients together, with good timing, and then we wait for the transformation to occur. When we bake a cake, at some point we must leave it alone and not keep looking and poking and prodding. So we can prepare and do our very best, and then the moment must come when we feel ready to have faith in the process, sit back and let the magic happen.
